


Notes on Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

by Emma_Oz



Category: Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)
Genre: Criticism, Essays, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-11
Updated: 2014-02-11
Packaged: 2018-01-11 23:38:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1179301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emma_Oz/pseuds/Emma_Oz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I want to write a defense of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.  No, I want to write a celebration of it.  Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is a MGM musical produced in 1954, and it rocks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Notes on Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers - Notes 

 

I want to write a defense of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. No, I want to write a celebration of it. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is a MGM musical produced in 1954, and it rocks.

Summary

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is set in the wonderful world of Hollywood’s wild west. It’s a place where buxom, white-toothed women might stride onto the set at any moment, singing about the glories of the natural life. Flowers and feelings often feature in these melodies.

The movie opens as Adam Pontipee heads down to town from the hills where he lives with his six biblically named brothers: Benjamin, Caleb, Daniel, Ephraim, Frank (Frankincense) and the blond, big eyed, baby Gideon. Adam has decided that what he needs is a wife. He tells the storekeeper he’s come to town to get a woman, and he wanders about the place evaluating and rejecting women. Presumably quite a few of them might also have rejected him...

But he decides on Milly when he sees that she is a good worker and a good cook. She, poor fool, falls for Adam immediately and marries him then and there. Little knowing that Adam has the emotional range of an autistic teaspoon, she sets out with him up through the narrow pass to the homestead where she confidently expects the two of them will live in solitary happiness.

She arrives at the homestead and finds it infested with feral, mannerless mountain men. Coping remarkably well, she throws a table of food at them and rapidly gains the ascendancy. In the course of a musical number she trains them in manners, dancing and etiquette. The attention they give her probably makes up for Adam’s complete lack of interest in her as a human being.

She brings the boys to town where they meet six fairly interchangeable girls. Only the sluttish Dorcas and the vaguely retarded Alice stand out. They attend a social which has one of the best dance scenes ever - the barn raising scene. The Pontipee brothers fight with the city folk suitors for the girls in the course of the barn raising. The dance - which involves hammer throwing - is a big number and rehearsals for it took three weeks or three quarters of the rehearsal time for the movie. Milly begs the boys not to get into a fight, but her wish is undone when Adam starts a ruckus.

Discouraged by their failure to woo the girls through their acrobatic dance routine, the Pontipee brothers return to the farm. There they voice their misery at losing the women they love with a very disturbing song and dance routine which hints at bestiality. As the chorus sings ‘It’s hard to sleep, when you sleep with sheep’ Ephraim does a ballet with an axe. (He had been specially selected for his ballet background, though he was forbidden to do foppish pirouettes. Presumably the axe work was a bonus.)

One of the brothers decides to leave. Milly, distraught at the hideous prospect of being left alone with her much mustachioed husband, convinces him to talk to the boys. Her plan backfires, however, when Adam gives them the worst advice ever. He concocts a scheme whereby they are to kidnap the girls and bring them back to the mountain to marry them. 

He wins them over to this plan by pointing out that the Romans had done this to populate their lands with the Sabine women. They then launch into a song which makes the bestiality number look positively mainstream. They sing what must be one of the few jaunty show tunes about women enjoying rape: ‘They acted angry and annoyed, but secretly was overjoyed.’

The Pontipee brothers then rush down to the town. Forgetting the need to secure a minister, the boys kidnap the girls. They are pulled through windows, dropped into sacks and abducted from their beds. There is much horrified squealing, particularly when Ephraim and Daniel realise they have each others’ girls and exchange them.

They escape town and make it back through the now very snowy and dangerous mountain pass. The outraged fathers (and with reason) are in hot pursuit, when the Pontipee brothers trigger an avalanche by allowing the girls to scream. They are now cut off for the winter.

The poor girls arrive at the homestead and throw themselves into Milly’s arms. She rescues them and banishes the boys to the barn. Adam throws a hissy fit when Milly criticises his insane and misogynistic plan and takes off to spend the winter in an outstation.

The girls settle in for the long winter alone in the house while the boys spend the time pining for them in the barn. When the girls are disheartened (and sluttishly parading around in their underwear) Milly reveals that she is expecting a baby. She gives birth in spring, shortly before the pass reopens. 

The birth reunites the boys/abductors and girls/victims. They frolic in the barn yard, sharing meaningful glances over the pig pen. The boys decide to return the girls but it is by then too late. The girls vigorously resist and, as the brothers are dragging them from their hiding places, the much delayed rescue party finally arrives.

Naturally the fathers are horrified to find their daughters being wrestled to the ground while feebly shouting ‘No, no!’ to their vile abductors. A lynching seems likely when a baby’s cry is heard in the background. 

The priest asks: ‘Whose child is that?’

All the girls reply: ‘Mine!’

And there is a mass shotgun wedding. 

They all live happily ever after, except, perhaps, Milly who is forced to take Adam back. The upside to that is that he is so entranced with his new daughter that he admits that he would feel quite upset if she were forcibly abducted. With this hope of some emotional growth on his part, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers ends.

Analysis

What is to be made of this spectacularly pre-feminist tale? Where did the rather wacky idea for this movie come from? How was it taken up by Hollywood?

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers was based on Stephen Vincent Benet’s novel from the 1920s called The Sobbin’ Women. The novel was in turn based on the tale of the Sabine women in Plutarch. Plutarch’s story of the founding of Rome - with the rape of women of a neighbouring tribe - had long been regarded as a heroic tale of nation building Benet added the novel twist of making it humorous.

The material was then taken up by director Stanley Donen and the screen writers Albert Hackett, Frances Goodrich and Dorothy Kingsley. They appear to have still harbored doubts as to the audiences’ possible responses to the story as they ensured that the abductions were firmly within the conventions of comedy. Gideon, for instance, kidnaps the dopey Alice by pretending to be her cat crying at the doorstep. As she goes to check on it, her mother shouts out ‘Oh, it’s alright, she’s here’. The directions for the stage show make the abductions even more ridiculous. Martha and Liza, for instance, are kidnapped by men disguised as rocks which they sit on. 

Hitting the right tone of non-overtly sexual and humorous abduction was presumably quite difficult. The creators rejected the title The Sobbin’ Women (possibly not light enough to those missing the classical reference). They considered A Bride for Seven Brothers but rejected it as possibly salacious (to polygamists) and settled finally on Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (cheery, intriguing and promising mass dance scenes).

Stanley Donen, I salute you and your musical depiction of non-overtly sexual and humorous abduction. Who would have thought it was possible to walk such a line? Well done.


End file.
